Does DevOps Need Enhanced Security?

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Does DevOps Need Enhanced Security?

Adopting DevOps is bringing automation to the development process, therefore it is necessary that enterprises automate security. Though the organizations have traditional security tools in place, it will be a challenging task to ensure security to DevOps practices with existing security tools.

DevOps is one of the most happening things for technological development in recent years. A large majority of the global CIO’s and IT managers are embracing DevOps as on of the most influential technological innovations, significantly transforming the software development cycle.

Technically DevOps is neither a product nor market, but it is a powerful method that leverages the best new technologies and automation tools to radically transform the software development process on the whole. Technology managers says DevOps is an innovative idea for running IT more streamlined.

DevOps enables enterprises to effectively align application development with IT operations. As DevOps is very different from the traditional development process, enterprises that plan to adopt DevOps need to bring new tools and technologies into the process to support that transition.

Industry experts state that security is one of the critical aspects to be considered for any enterprises that is transitioning to DevOps.

PJ Kirner, CTO, at Illumio, states that any organization that adopts DevOps should sufficiently focus on security risks that arise during development and deployment processes. DevOps drives faster speeds for application development and business agility. The strength of DevOps lies in accelerating the development and deployment processes of smaller projects which is significantly faster than traditional development methods.

DevOps is a more de-centralized way of the development process as various teams are allowed to run applications simultaneously which brings the scope for security concerns into the limelight.

Due to the additional speed that DevOps brings to the development process, the security team faces challenges in understanding the risks as the whole process gets complicated. Though the traditional development and deployment processes are time consuming, they give required time gaps for security team to harden the security at end of development cycle.

Adopting DevOps is bringing automation to the development process, therefore it is necessary that enterprises automate security. Though the organizations have traditional security tools in place, it will be a challenging task to ensure security to DevOps practices with existing security tools.

Challenges With Traditional Security Products

Traditional security policies will be less flexible and are not easily adaptable to infrastructure or application changes due to rigid security architectures.

Due to heavy firewall rules in traditional security tools, for any change in application or infrastructure a whole new set of rules need to be reviewed manually, which stand as a big hurdle to DevOps practices.

Security automation and integration in DevOps tools requires API’s which will not be readily available in traditional security products.

Addressing Security Challenges With the Right Security Tools

Security policies need to be further strengthened to use application context instead of simply relying in IP addresses alone.

DevOps should define security changes that are required at every individual phase in application development instead of at the end of the cycle.

Security teams need APIs that allow security to integrate with other party tools.

DevOps teams need to verify the security policies well before they are enforced.

Despite some security challenges, DevOps has tremendous value, driving speed and innovation in the application development life cycle. Enterprises that adopt DevOps need to focus on bringing required agility to security, similar to the application development cycle.